Madeline Grant

Ding ding! Round two – or is it round 22? – of the Mandelson saga was underway in the Foreign Affairs Committee. Sir Olly Robbins was going to give his side of the story.  There was a narrative that the past Tory government was at war with the civil service. In fact, it seems that for all its presentation as a government of sensiblism, Labour are the ones decimating the upper echelons of the Sir Humphrey class. I suspect senior mandarins are diving into doorways every time a bus comes down Whitehall at speed, lest Sir Keir arrive to throw them unceremoniously under it. Fresh from beneath the wheels of the Number 12 to Dulwich Library was Sir Olly. He was polite, he was put together.

You can always tell it’s going to be a good day in the Commons when the government spin operation happens before a Prime Ministerial statement. Clearly predicting a bloodbath, No. 10 tried to trot their lines out early. We were told that Sir Keir had inadvertently misled the House, in response to which we would see an angry Starmer. This is meant to sound out of character, incongruous somehow – like ‘jolly Bridget Phillipson’, 'honest Bob Jenrick' or ‘competent David Lammy’. To be fair, it does sound incongruous that Starmer is angry at the Mandelson affair, but in the same way that ‘man with box of matches and 47 gallons of propane angry that his house exploded’ might sound incongruous.

Handbags at noon! It’s always nice to watch Sir Keir Starmer descend into the sort of incandescent fury that living under his government induces from most people on a daily basis. The absolute standout moment of today’s PMQs was one not caught by the cameras but a behind-the-scenes bit of piggy rage from the PM. Sir Keir Starmer's anger when Lindsay Hoyle told him that it wasn’t 'leader of the opposition’s questions' was visible. But it was after the session, when a puce-coloured Starmer had an argument with Hoyle that the real joy was to be had, culminating in his flouncing out of the chamber. As he did so, he shot the Speaker an absolutely filthy look. Get her! All this had, in fairness, been prompted by Kemi Badenoch.

‘Samantha Niblett’s Summer of Sex’ sounds like something that the police would have shut down during the grubbiest era of Soho peep shows. Not so: it is – just as the world teeters on the brink of geopolitical collapse – an actual initiative by a Labour MP announced today. The dignity-phobic South Derbyshire MP Samantha Niblett has launched a campaign to make 2026 the ‘summer of sex’, calling for ‘more open, inclusive, lifelong sex education’. Niblett wants to have ‘a national conversation’ about pleasure, including the benefits of masturbation, and said she intends to ‘talk about sex all summer’. Never has the case for earplugs been more compelling.

There’s an entire glorious genre of photos that we might tentatively entitle: ‘Keir Starmer standing in front of people who visibly loathe him.’ His trip to the Gulf this week means we can add military personnel to the list of people who’ve been subjected to these grey reluctant photobombs, alongside oil workers, school children and the cabinet. Starmer claiming some active part in the Iran ceasefire is like the cast and crew of The Clangers wanting credit for the Artemis moon mission Sir Keir’s latest trip is a masterpiece in ambulance chasing.

British history is littered with elections and Elections. The first type, common or garden elections, are fought with prosaic issues at their core. Readers might remember the 2001 general election, which saw such pressing topics as the fate of Kidderminster hospital pushed to the fore. The 1865 general election was also considered uneventful by contemporaries. Even contests nominally involving major changes can be just ‘elections’. The tedium of 2024, featuring cynical electoral bribery, with the result a foregone conclusion and the stated policy platforms of the two main parties largely similar, is a prime example. What, then, are the other type: the Elections?

PMQs last week was embarrassing: not a single answer to a single question. The bar then was low – yet still today was, if not just as bad, still incredibly unimpressive. Mrs Badenoch began by asking a very simple question about new drilling in the North Sea. Sir Keir claimed that this was not his responsibility, but the responsibility of the secretary of state, meaning – as many suspect – that Ed Miliband has more control over the levers of power than his boss.  ‘He’s the prime minister!’ bellowed Mrs Badenoch. Opposite her, Sir Keir put his head in his hands, thus ironically mimicking exactly how most people feel when they see him. The argument about North Sea oil and gas continued. Sir Keir insisted he couldn’t act due to the magic spells of legalism.

Rachel Reeves was in the House today, responding to the war in the Middle East. That as a statement alone has an air of innate tragicomic potential to it: like Igglepiggle responding to Spanish Flu.  Despite the gravity of the situation, it was more of what we’ve come to expect from Reeves. She did her standard park and bark in the Commons, delivering everything by means of a permanent earnest glottal stop. Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, she makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective.

‘I don’t want to raise levels of public anxiety.’ Believe it or not, these words came out of the mouth of Sir Keir Starmer. If they were true, one would expect him to announce he was off to live as a hermit in the Hebrides, rather than continue to chair meetings of Cobra. Yes, in the midst of the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the Prime Minister was answering questions from the liaison committee, mostly made up by his own MPs. He has previously had tetchy sessions here, but today he was on the receiving end of some seriously soft-ball questions on foreign policy. MPs questioned him in such a pathetic and fawning manner that they made the woman who screams the news on North Korean TV look like Jeremy Paxman.

Last week, the body of an 18-day old baby girl was found in Westminster, in desperately sad circumstances. The baby’s mother has since been charged with her murder and stands accused of throwing her daughter out of a third-floor window. Five days later, and a few streets away, the House of Lords voted to approve the Crime and Policing Bill – including the controversial amendment, Clause 208. Proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, Clause 208 would decriminalise self-administered abortions after the 24-week limit. The new legal position is that whatever a woman does to end her own pregnancy, at whatever stage, is no business of the criminal law. Should a mother decide to abort a full-term or late-term infant at home, the state will, essentially, be indifferent to that.

When a fully greased Sir Keir Starmer is finally bundled, squealing, out of Downing Street, one wonders what he might turn his hand to by way of work to keep a roof over his head? I suspect his time as a lawyer doesn’t bear repetition and he’s hardly going to be asked to do after-dinner speaking. Perhaps he could mimic other PMs and turn to writing. I suspect, though, it will need to be children’s books that help him pay the bills. Boys and girls across the country could be delighted by stories with titles such as The Mysterious Expenses Claim, The Majority that Vanished and The Mandy, the Paedo and Me.

Downing Street’s briefing room increasingly looks like a municipal crematorium. It is a depressing feast of cheap teak and black edges. Other countries announce major foreign policy decisions in front of reminders of their glorious past or signs of their present strength. President Macron recently gave a speech in front of a nuclear submarine. Sir Keir gave today’s looking like he was about to announce a non-denominationally specific period of quiet reflection whilst someone played a MIDI file of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. The crematorium analogy of course invites a subsequent question: is he the undertaker or is he the corpse? One suspects a bit of both.